Barrelling Around the Balkans--October/November 2016

Ranomafana, Madagascar

Our three weeks in Europe in October and November seem very long ago now as I sit in a tropical valley in the mountains of Madagascar, but with an effort I can shift my attention back to that action-packed period of time long enough to get it down in print. 

Terri and I hiking in Meteora, with a small uninhabited monastery behind

We arrived in Athens on October 18^th from Johannesburg, via Dubai. We were there to lead a trip for school students, and the first ten days were devoted to doing the pre-trip and then running the trip itself.  We spent most of our time in the Meteora area, a beautiful part of northern Greece that had been on my to-see list for decades, ever since watching For Your Eyes Only back in about 1983.  The monasteries really look like something out of a fairytale, perched high atop eroded conglomerate cliffs.  We (and our student group) did a great 4-hour hike in the Meteora hills leading ultimately to one of the monasteries; they definitely need to be approached on foot in order to appreciate them properly. 

Meteora landscape

The surroundings are not what you immediately think of when you hear the word “Greece”:  no Mediterranean blue, no maquis bush.  Instead there are ancient oak forests full of wild boar and even wolves and bears.  There are obscure little hermitages tucked away in tiny hidden valleys, and even a cave full of Neanderthal and Neolithic remains (sadly closed, although we did drop into the museum).  One day, we drove up to Lake Plastiras, a lake high in the Pindus Mountains, along a spectacular road that I wanted to keep following to see where it led.  Overall, we were quite pleased with our Meteora experience.

Salamander in the Meteora forests

One of the Meteora monasteries

Terri, me and Leonidas at Thermopylae

We also visited Delphi, one of the most evocative ruins in all of Greece, nestled under the bulk of Mount Parnassus, and (on the way between the two) passed the site of the Battle ofThermopylae (a strangely forgotten and unatmospheric spot but a place of huge historical resonance).  In Athens we went through the amazing new(ish) Acropolis Museum, one of the great museums of the world, and strolled around the Acropolis itself on Oxi Day, a national holiday devoted to the word “No” (said to the Italians in 1940); there was free admission to the Acropolis that day, and the crowds were astonishing.

Meteora hermitage carved into a cliff face

Driving around rural Greece, though, the signs of the economic plight of most of the country were everywhere, with shuttered factories, boarded-up shops and derelict half-built buildings everywhere.  Thiva, ancient Thebes, stuck in my mind as a particularly grim example of post-2008 post-industrial wasteland.  Talking to Greeks, it doesn’t sound as though anything has really improved despite 8 years of bailouts, austerity and political brinkmanship.

The view from Delphi

Friday, October 28^th found us on a flight to Tirana, Albania.  We wanted to do a quick busman’s holiday around the Balkans, and the Greek rental car companies are not keen on letting their cars go across borders into countries like Albania, so we decided to start in Albania, where we picked up a rental car in the airport for 15 euros a day.   I had been to the Balkans twice before, both times on a bicycle.  In 2009, after finishing my Silk Road Ride, I had cycled quickly through the countries of the region in November, too late in the year to really appreciate the surroundings.  In 2015 Terri and I had ridden down the Danube, ending up in Bulgariaafter passing through Croatia, Serbia and Romania.  This time we were in a hurry once again, but we had a few objectives:  we wanted to visit friends in Mostar, I wanted to see Sarajevo, Terri wanted to add Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro to her country list, and I wanted to see the mountains of northern Albania.  I also wanted to see Gjirokastro, in the far south of Albania, but we just didn’t have time to fit that in.

Terri in the Accursed Mountains above Boga

We spent the night in a cheap guesthouse in a tower block in Tirana before pointing our wheels north on Saturday morning.  We escaped the manic traffic of Tirana and got onto a newly built motorway that made for easy driving.  Our objective was a mountain range in the far north of the country known as the Accursed Mountains; with a name like that, we had to visit!  After passing through more snarled traffic in Shkoder, we turned off the main road and entered a spectacular world of mountains and old stone villages.  We drove up, up, up along a valley lined with autumn colours on the trees.  The weather was perfect, and every turn of the valley brought another postcard-worthy view.  The limestone cliffs shone white in the sunshine and contrasted sharply with the deep blue of the mountain skies.  It reminded both of us of fall weekends in the Swiss Alps, and the brand-new asphalt road could have been straight out of Switzerland as well.  Finally, atop a 1600-metre high pass, we ran out of asphalt and although we bravely tried to push on in our tiny two-wheel drive compact Maruti, it was an unequal struggle and after having to back up on a narrow dirt track in the face of an oncoming livestock truck (actually we gave the keys to one of the farmers to back up for us, as it was a pretty scary stretch of road with a huge cliff on one side), we gave up and retreated to the pass.  

The valley of Boga

We had to abandon the idea of driving ourselves to the village of Theth (visible far, far below) and instead parked the car and went for a walk for a few hours up the valley to a dramatic viewpoint perched atop a cliff, looking down at the Theth Valley below our feet.  This mountainous area has gotten onto the radar of western European hikers in the past decade, and it’s easy to see why.  This area has all the beauty of the Alps at a tiny fraction the price, and with a tiny fraction of the number of hikers on it (we saw exactly none that day).  The hiking trail was well marked and well maintained.  We had read about a new international long-distance hiking trail, the Via Dinarica, and it passes right through this area.  If I had much more time, I would love to hike the length of the Via Dinarica, getting to know this mountainous area of the world that is so little known in the West.

Hiking in the Accursed Mountains

After our hike, we drove back down the asphalt to the village of Boga, where we found accommodation in the home of the family of Zef, a gruff farmer.  He, his wife and his daughter Madgalena made us welcome in their farmhouse and we had a great time, despite not having any language in common other than a tiny amount of Italian.  Like everyone in the valley, the family is Catholic; I hadn’t really appreciated what a multi-confessional country Albania is, with Catholics making up the second biggest religious group (10% of the population) after Muslims (about 57%), just ahead of Eastern Orthodox (7%).  Mother Teresa was an ethnic Albanian Catholic (born in Skopje when that was a Turkish city; it was then a Serbian city before becoming the capital of modern Macedonia; this is why four different countries now claim her as their own; we had landed at Mother Teresa International Airport in Tirana), and it is encouraging that in a region not noted for its religious tolerance in the past few decades, Albania has not had any religiously inspired civil strife.  We had a wonderful evening trying to talk to the family, and Terri hit it off with Magdalena in particular.

Terri with our wonderful host family in Boga

It was a chilly evening, and we delayed our departure the next morning while the sun warmed up the bottom of the valley.  We went for another short hike up above Boga in the sunshine, drinking in the views and watching the villagers walking back from church service.  We returned to the farmhouse to find the parents entertaining neighbours with coffee and cake after church, while other villagers took themselves to the local café for something a little stronger.  We said our goodbyes and drove off down the valley, snapping photos and promising ourselves that one day we would return to explore the Accursed Mountains properly.

Fall colours in Albania

Sveti Stefan, Montenegro

We drove north along the main road, past fields planted with medicinal herbs (a big cash crop in the area) and eventually to the northern shore of Lake Shkoder, where we crossed the border into Montenegro.  It was a quick, painless process, as all our subsequent Balkan border crossings proved to be.  We bought our 40-euro car insurance Green Card (good for all European countries for 15 days), showed our passports and car registration, and two minutes later we were off into Montenegro.  It was a very pretty drive along the lakeshore, past monasteries, prettily situated villages and a smattering of holiday homes.  Eventually we popped through a tunnel linking the lake with the Adriatic coast and turned north.  We drove along one of the prettiest coastlines in Europe, one of the highlights of my 2009 bike trip, and eventually turned off the road in Sveti Stefan to find accommodation for the night.  We first had a stroll along the coast, past the bridge to the gorgeous offshore island of Sveti Stefan (once Tito’s summer fiefdom, now a private and very expensive Russian-owned hotel) and past another couple of top-end hotels on the mainland.  It was a very pretty walk, but eventually we returned to the car and got serious about searching for a place to stay.  Most rental apartments were closed for the season, but just before sundown we found a place for 30 euros, ran to a nearby grocery store for wine and toasted a dramatic sunset over a wind-whipped Adriatic. A takeaway pasta carbonara dinner and an early night completed the day.

Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

The wind howled all night, but once the sun came up on Monday, October 31^st, the sea calmed down.  We had a slow, relaxed start with time for me to have a run up and down the hilly streets of town before a breakfast of bread, honey, olives and jam.  By 10 am we were underway, driving further up the coast before turning inland to drive halfway around the dramatic (and dramatically traffic-choked) Bay of Kotor.  We turned inland up a big climb over the coastal mountains and onto a limestone plateau that continued for many kilometres to the Bosnian border and beyond.  We continued along the plateau, through the Republika Srpska (the Serbian bit of Bosnia-Hercegovina) until further progress was halted at the pseudo-border with the Bosniak-Croat confederation by mine-clearing operations beside the road, a reminder of the lasting aftereffects of the Bosnian War.  Once the mine-clearers were finished, we drove upstream to pretty Trebinje, then along a lovely valley and over a hill to reach Mostar where my friend and former LAS colleague Jonathan and his wife Jane are living.  We rendezvoused with Jane at the United World College, located in the old Gymnase building in the centre of town, and drove to their apartment overlooking the old Turkish centre of Mostar.

Night over Mostar Old Town

Mostar is one of my favourite places in the Balkans, and I used to have a print of the Hungarian painter Csontvary’s painting of its famous Ottoman bridge hanging on my bedroom wall at university.  Jane, Terri and I walked down to the bridge and enjoyed the beautiful old Ottoman architecture of the surrounding streets.  The bridge was lit up (evening came early now that daylight savings time was over) and looked very pretty indeed.  We returned to the apartment to meet up with Jonathan, and the evening passed by very pleasantly over dinner and wine, catching up on the past few years since they left Leysin.

The next morning was the first day of November.  Jonathan left early for school and Jane waved us off as we drove our trusty Maruti upstream in the direction of Sarajevo.  It was a relatively short drive, and we arrived in the city by 1:30.  We found a parking spot near our rental apartment, right beside the massive Sarajevo Brewery, but couldn’t get hold of the apartment owner to get the keys.  We repaired to a nearby café to use their wifi and have a beer and realized that the non-smoking revolution in bars and restaurants has not yet come to Bosnia.  We were thoroughly fumigated with cigarettes before the owner showed up with the keys and let us in. 

Terri and Jane in Mostar's Old Town

Where the First World War kicked off

Terri had been to Sarajevo a decade before, but I had never made it that far into Bosnia.  We strolled into the old Ottoman centre of town and headed straight for Sarajevo’s biggest claim to fame, the street corner at which Gavrilo Princip lit the fuse that led to the carnage of World War One by assassinating Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28^th, 1914.  It’s just an ordinary-looking street corner, but a branch of the Sarajevo City Museum occupies one of the buildings on the corner and displays pictures of the fateful day and its aftermath.  The amazing thing to me is that Franz Ferdinand had already survived one assassination attempt by the Serb nationalists of the Black Hand that very day.  Rather than keeping himself safe and out of sight until he could leave the city, he decided to drive right back into the city centre an hour later, which is when Princip was more successful second time around.  We took a few photos and then continued our stroll around the old town, past mosques and medressehs and the old market.  It was very atmospheric, and we eventually retired to Pod Letom for a hearty meal; photos outside and on the wall attested to the fact that Bill Clinton had eaten there twice over the years (both times since he retired from the presidency).  We returned to our apartment, re-parked the car out of the paid lot we had left it in onto the street outside the brewery, and retired early for the night.

Mosque in Sarajevo Old Town

Sarajevo was the furthest north we would reach on our Balkans peregrinations.  Wednesday, November 2^nd found us heading out of town along a dramatic gorge cut into the mountains.  Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, and we climbed up to the village of Pale, site of the ski races and then the capital of Radovan Karadzic’s murderous Serbian republican forces.  We continued along, past other ski towns, until we suddenly came upon the border with Montenegro.  As soon as we crossed the border, we left behind the dark, slightly gloomy valleys of Bosnia for radiant highlands in the interior of Montenegro.  It really seems as though Montenegro is the scenic highlight of the former Yugoslavia, no matter what part of the country you visit.  After driving for hours along small roads, we found ourselves in the town of Berane as afternoon turned to evening, so we found a cheap hotel and called it a night.

The following day (Thursday, November 3^rd) was grey and rainy, a sharp contrast to the brilliant sunshine we had had almost every day so far.  We drove past tiny ski resorts and then up, up, up to the mountain pass leading into Kosovo.  Terri had never visited Kosovo and was keen to see the country.  Our plan was to stop in Peja (Pec) and spend the afternoon doing some hiking and visiting the Serbian monastery.  The weather didn’t improve, however, and Peja proved to be a crowded, chaotic construction zone of a city, so we just kept driving (along streets named after Tony Blair, John Kerry, Bill Clinton and others involved in ending the Kosovo War back in 1999) towards the Macedonian border.  I remembered in 2009 not being overly enamoured of Kosovo, and this trip confirmed my previous opinion.  The mountains along the frontiers are very pretty, but the country is very densely populated and is just an unending straggle of half-built new houses, of little interest to the casual tourist.

Alexander the Great statue, Skopje 

We crossed into Macedonia on a road down a deep gorge and immediately the weather and the depressing industrial landscape changed.  We drove into the traffic snarl of downtown Skopje and got immediately lost.  We went in circles, we cursed our Maps.me smartphone app, and eventually we parked the car in an obscure backstreet and set out on foot to find a place to stay.  We ended up in a nice apartment overlooking the remodelled centre of Skopje and set off to explore.

I remember Skopje as a slightly artsy town with a bunch of cafes and Irish pubs in the slightly worn downtown core.  The past seven years have seen immense changes to the cityscape, as the government has lavished hundreds of millions of dollars completely gutting and redeveloping the city centre in a style best described as Las Vegas Marble Kitsch.  Alexander the Great has been adopted as the national hero (even though the ancient Macedonian kingdom was centred further south, in modern-day Greece, and modern Macedonians are Slavic speakers with a language most akin to Bulgarian), and the government has erected immense gilt statues of Alexander, and of his father Philip and mother Olympias and baby Alex, in the middle of a huge pedestrian thoroughfare.  New pedestrian bridges have gone up over the river, lined with more statues of historical figures (both ancient and nineteenth century), while a historical museum, an opera house and several government ministries all rise in Corinthian columns above the bemused Soviet-era concrete lowrises surrounding the centre.  It all looks very kitsch, and it’s apparently not hugely popular with a large section of the population, fed up with official corruption and political underhandedness.

Anti-government paint bombs, Skopje

Some of the marble wedding-cake buildings in Skopje

If you look carefully, you can see blotches of purple, green, red and yellow staining the white marble of the new constructions, the result of protestors hurling balloons filled with paint against the hated symbols of theregime.  We wandered around the downtown taking pictures and reading the captions on dozens of statues.  We were divided in our opinion of the city’s makeover:  I thought it looked very fake and artificial, but Terri thought it was an improvement on the soulless concrete that was once there.

In 2009 I had enjoyed Macedonia more than any other country I visited on my Balkan bike blitz, and I was keen to see new parts of the country and to show Terri the undoubted highlight of Macedonia, the ancient monastery town of Ohrid.  We drove west out of Skopje the next morning and then turned south, passing through pretty valleys studded with minarets (this northwest corner of Macedonia, abutting Kosovo and Albania, is where the country’s sizeable Muslim minority live), over a couple of passes and finally into the resort town of Ohrid.  We found our holiday apartment (at 15 euros a night for a big apartment, it was a deal) owned by a personable professor named Joce, checked in and then went for a wander. 

Veletsevo village, overlooking Lake Ohrid

Ohrid is historically a very important spot, as it was at the monasteries along the shores of the lovely highland lake that Greek Orthodox monks like Clement of Ohrid developed the Cyrillic alphabet to write down Old Church Slavonic, the mother tongue of all the Slavic languages.  We strolled past a couple of the monasteries (sadly one was under reconstruction and the other was locked) and then along the lakeshore, past another big government project to build a new university in the old town.  We bought roast chestnuts to ward off the early evening chill and watched the light fade over the lake.

Hiking in lovely Galicica

The next day we didn’t have to drive to a new city to sleep (the only time we spent two consecutive nights in the same place on the entire trip), and we took advantage of this to have a day of hiking under glorious sunshine in the mountains of the Galicica NationalPark that rise straight out of Lake Ohrid.  We had only a vague hint of a map, and the trail markings were pretty inconsistent, but we still had a splendid day in the mountains, soaking up huge views that extended across the lake into Albania and south into Greece.  We had the entire area almost entirely to ourselves, although our starting point, the village of Veletsevo, was crowded with people laying flowers and having picnics at the graves of family members in the village cemetery (perhaps because it was the first weekend after All Saint’s Day?).  We underestimated the amount of time we would need for the trek, and did the last half hour in the dark, but it was a huge highlight for me on this Balkan adventure, and reinforced my desire to come back with a few weeks to spare to do some long-distance hiking through this mountainous hiker’s paradise.

Hiking in Galicica

Sunday November 6^th found us finishing up the driving of the trip with a few hours from Ohrid back to Tirana.  The scenery was dramatic much of the way as we dropped out of the highland basin of Lake Ohrid down a narrow canyon to Elbasan, where we stopped for an immense lamb feast.  From there we were only an hour or so from Tirana, and we managed to navigate the traffic horror of the Albanian capital more or less unscathed.  We checked in again to Guesthouse Mary and had an early night before our morning flight.

The next morning found us dropping off the car at the airport and checking in for our Aegean Airlines flight back to Athens.  We made our way to the Adonis Hotel, retrieved our stored luggage and then spent the afternoon separately on frustrating errands.  I wanted to get my camera cleaned as there is dust on the CCD, but Monday afternoons by law all shops in Athens close at 3 pm, just after I got to the camera shop.  I didn’t yet know about the early closing law, so I wasted more time trying to find outdoor equipment shops, which were similarly shut.  Terri meanwhile was navigating the crowds and hopelessness of the Greek medical system, trying to get her left knee, still sore 7 weeks after falling on it in the Tsodilo Hills, looked at.  She eventually saw an overworked doctor and paid a ridiculously low 9 euros to do so, but didn’t get much useful practical information on what to do to get better. 

The evening made up for the day, however, as I found some Spanish cava for sale and brought home some take-out gyros sandwiches.  We sat on our perfectly-situated terrace looking out at the lit-up Parthenon and savouring the historical atmosphere.  We both agreed that Greece and the Balkans deserve more time on a future trip, although it’s not clear when that will be.

And then it was November 8^th and we were on an air odyssey, first to Dubai, then Johannesburg, then Nairobi and finally to Antananarivo, ready to spend the next six weeks exploring the “Eighth Continent”, the wildlife diversity hotspot of Madagascar.  Stay tuned to this space to read up on our various adventures in Madagascar!

Lake Ohrid seen from Galicica

Closing the Loop: the last leg of Stanley's Travels, version 1.0

Nosy Be, December 1, 2016

Sociable weaver nest, Kalahari

When we crossed into South Africa from Botswana at Bokspits, a microscopic border crossing in the far northwest of the country, on Monday, October 3^rd, it was in one sense a homecoming for Stanley (a South African registered vehicle), and in another sense the end of the adventurous part of our big loop around Southern Africa.  We still had well over 1500 km to drive to the Johannesburg area, where we were going to store Stanley for a couple of months, but suddenly we were in a country full of shopping malls and sprawling suburbs and it felt as though we had left Africa behind at the border.

We drove south from Bokspits on perfect new tarmac, past big fenced-in ranches and huge communal nests built by sociable weaver birds on top of telephone poles.  Desert melons, the life-giving moisture source of the Kalahari, grew beside the road wherever fences prevented the cattle from eating them.  As we approached Upington, the regional centre, a structure oddly reminiscent of the Death Star appeared in the distance, glowing strangely.  It was a solar-thermal electricity plant, built by a Spanish company, in which a huge array of mirrors reflect sunlight upwards, concentrating the rays at the top of a high tower where the combined heat is used to generate electric power.  Apparently Upington has three of these structures nearby, although we only saw one, and hundreds of Spanish engineers live and work in Upington building and maintaining them. 

Kalahari desert melons

Upington was a culture shock after the emptiness of the Botswanan Kalahari.  We drove through fancy white suburbs to an immense Pick’n’Pay supermarket and shopping mall.  We refilled Stanley’s fridge (working well since its repair in Maun a few days before), changed our leftover Botswanan pula for South African rand, ate some meat pies (our favourite southern African quick lunch), bought Terri a new pair of binoculars, and then drove west towards Augrabies Falls National Park.  It was a pretty drive along the Orange River, past a long series of irrigated vineyards that contrasted sharply with the dusty Kalahari scrubland beside them. 

The Upington Death Star

There was no camping available at Augrabies Falls National Park, so we found a place to stay a few kilometres outside the gate at the Augrabies Falls Lodge and Campground.  It was well maintained, with pretty grounds and good facilities, but a bit close to the noise of the main road.  We finished up the huge pot of lentil and pea soup that we had been carrying around and slept soundly inside Stanley.

We set off for Augrabies National Park the next morning on our trusty folding bicycles after some fresh scones for breakfast courtesy of Terri.  We went first to see the waterfalls, an impressive sight of crashing waters even in the dry season.  The canyon into which the river hurtles is deep, steep and made of beautiful slabs of reddish sandstone.  We set off on the Dassie Hike, but turned back when Terri’s leg, still sore from her tumble at Tsodilo Hills a few weeks earlier, complained about the steep river crossings.  We opted for the shorter but more scenic hike out to Arrowhead Point, where two side canyons join the main river.  One of those tributaries has Twin Falls on it, another beautiful waterfall.

Terri at Arrowhead Point

We had a picnic lunch seated in the scanty shade of a small tree (it was properly hot by midday) and watched a pair of rock kestrels nesting on the sheer cliff on the opposite bank of the canyon.  Pale-winged starlings, a characteristic species of Augrabies Falls, flew by in small groups.  As we walked back to the lodge, more new species appeared:  acacia pied barbets and southern masked weavers, along with dozens of fat, contented rock hyraxes (dassies, if you’re South African).  We rode back to our campground, then returned shortly before sunset for a night safari.  We were hoping to see aardwolves (a secretive type of hyena) but had no luck, although our spotlights picked out fleeting glimpses of the eyes of genets, African wild cats and spotted eagle owls.  We had more substantial views of eland, springbok, steenbok and klipspringer, as well as Cape hare, scrub hare and red rock rabbit.  We cycled home in the pitch black under clear starry skies and went to bed immediately.

Twin Falls

The next day was less productive, although we did manage to do some laundry, bake brownies and catch up on e-mail, as well as getting in a long run, some yoga and broiling some delicious lamb for dinner. 

Thursday, October 6^th found us backtracking to Upington.  We had originally planned to head further west to see the desert flowers around Springbok, but a phone call there revealed that in fact the flower season had peaked a month earlier and there were almost no flowers to be seen.  Rather than drive 400 km on a wild goose chase, we started the long retreat to Johannesburg instead.  It was a short, pleasant drive back to Upington, once again through the vineyards and orchards along the river, and we picked a big municipal campsite, Die Eiland, as our base for the next few days.  It was pleasantly situated on the banks of the Orange River, even if it did look a bit past its prime.  We set up our table and camp chairs to claim a spot, then drove back downtown to get some work done on Stanley.  An auto-electrician fixed the malfunctioning door switch that had been setting off our car alarm intermittently for the past two weeks (for the princely sum of US$ 18), and then while Terri went shopping for some new clothes, I dropped off the car at a garage to replace a blown front shock and to replace a worn-out and leaking tire, and dropped off my malfunctioning watch to get repaired.  By 5:00 I was picking up Terri to head back to Die Eiland.

Some desert vegetation

When we drove into the campsite, it was immediately obvious that our camp table, chairs and our dish drying rack were all gone.  We asked around, both the three locals sitting around having a braai, and the campground employees, but nobody (of course) had seen anything.  Infuriated at the pointless vandalism of such a theft, we went back to reception, demanded (and received) our money back and called the police to report the theft.  The police were spectacularly unhelpful, much to Terri’s disgust, and we eventually gave up and moved across the river to a tiny private campground, Sakkie se Arkie, where we stayed for the next 4 nights.  It was safe and friendly and well-run, very unlike Die Eiland.  We were annoyed about losing our chairs and table, but we heard that we had gotten off lucky; other campers who have stayed the night have had far more stolen, and one couple staying indoors at Die Eiland’s bungalows had thieves break in while they were in the bungalow and clean them out of all their valuables.  Everyone in town agreed that Die Eiland had fallen apart over the past 15 years under dubious municipal management, having once been rated the top municipal campground in the country back in the apartheid era.

Lovely rock face, Augrabies Falls

The next day we went to the Kalahari Mall to buy me a few new clothes, and to replace our table, chairs and dishrack.  The chairs were expensive, but were so comfortable that we didn’t really begrudge the money.  We headed back to our campground and I spent a while trying my luck at fishing; although others were getting bites, I got nothing but snags, and had to cut off three hooks in a row. 

Terminally relaxed hyrax, Augrabies Falls

Saturday, October 8^th found us ready to head off, but when I went over to pick up my watch, the watch repair shop was unexpectedly closed.  Since I had specifically asked if they would be open Saturday morning, I was quite annoyed, especially since they didn’t answer their various phones.  We had lunch, then cycled off to the big tourist sight in Upington, the Orange River Winery, for some wine tasting.  We were surprised to find that something relying on the tourist trade closed at 3 pm on a Saturday, so we were out of luck.  We retreated to town, frustrated, and found an Irish pub to have a huge meal and watch the New Zealand-South Africa rugby match.  It was a massacre, with the All Blacks running in 9 tries to humiliate the Springboks.  Strangely, Terri wasn’t the only person cheering the All Blacks; a number of non-white South Africans were cheering for the visitors as well.  Apparently the Springboks are still viewed as the team of the apartheid-era Boers, and don’t enjoy universal support among coloured and black South Africans. 

Augrabies Falls scenery

Sunday, October 9^th was another fairly lazy day, spent doing a few exercises, writing a blog post, having a long lunch, taking a long bird-watching stroll along the river with Terri, running and then having sundowner drinks with an interesting older couple, Ros and Anthony, both white East Africans (one from Kenya, the other from Tanzania) who are keen sailors and bird watchers.  We sat listening to some of their stories, then retreated to our campsite for a late dinner.  I stayed up late taking advantage of having good internet for once to post some photos from Botswana and upload my blog post.

Augrabies sunset light

Monday, October 10^th saw us finally break free of Upington, not without resistance.  The watch repair guy was open, but the watch wasn’t yet fixed.  We went to the grocery store to stock up, then returned to find the watch not repaired, but at least physically present.  Muttering imprecations, I took the watch and drove us out of town towards Johannesburg.  It was a long day of driving, most of it through not very interesting countryside (a mix of bleak desert, grim mining areas, rough towns and commercial farms), ending up at sundown in the small town of Delareyville, where we spent the night camped at the Pigmy Lodge, a small campground attached to a cheese farm.  We sampled some of their excellent goat cheeses with some wine before dinner, ate some leftovers and were in bed early, tired from driving.

Tuesday, October 11^th was the end of the road for the first leg of Stanley’s Travels.  We had a leisurely bacon and avocado breakfast and set off by 9 o’clock, carrying a couple of packets of the farm’s goat cheese.  Terri drove the first 100 km before I took over for the final 325 km.  We cruised into Johannesburg past the endless mining towns of the Witwatersrand.  We made it most of the way through the Johannesburg suburban sprawl without incident before hitting a traffic jam that saw us take an hour to cover 3 km.  Then, as suddenly as it had started, the traffic jam was over and we were flying out of town headed east towards the tiny town of Delmas, the headquarters of Blinkgat, the small camper manufacturer who had made Stanley’s camper insert.  We stopped off for meat pies at Pick’n’Pay, then followed directions out of town, past a dismal looking township of corrugated iron shacks, to a small farm just outside town where Sarel and Elize de Klerk, the owners of Blinkgat, live and run their workshop.

Maree and Stanley with Stanley's creator, Sarel de Klerk

We had thought about taking Stanley camping for the few days before our flight to Athens on Oct. 17^th, but Sarel and Elize urged us to camp in their garden, an offer which we gladly accepted.  We spent a few hours the next day going over Stanley, detailing the modifications and repairs that we wanted to have done in our absence.  A sliding drawer for our fridge, a new awning and some changes to the food and dish storage system, along with some much-needed rainproofing, were the main items, along with a general servicing of the pickup truck. We figured that since we had spent so long living in Stanley, we had figured out what we most wanted to make him even more user-friendly. 

The days slipped by easily, cleaning our stuff out of Stanley in preparation for the workshop and storing them in one of the farm’s outbuildings.  We had a lot of interesting discussions with Sarel and Elize, both of them keen explorers of southern Africa’s wild spaces, ate lots of good food, did some exercise and running and generally relaxed after five and a half months on the go. 

On Saturday we drove into Johannesburg to have lunch with my friend Angelo and his family.  We stayed overnight in The Birches, the small backpackers’ lodge where we had stayed when we had first bought Stanley back in April; Ian, the friendly owner, was curious to hear our stories from the road.  We also heard from one of our fellow guests that he had been mugged on the street in downtown Johannesburg that very day; we were glad that we had avoided the worse of South Africa's crime frenzy.  On Sunday we had brunch with my fellow Thunder Bay-ite Erin Conway-Smith (the southern Africa correspondent for the Economist) before heading back to Delmas. 

On Monday, October 17^th we bid Stanley a fond farewell for two months and caught a lift with Elize to OR Tambo Airport for a flight to Athens.  We won’t see Stanley again until December 21^st, when we return from Madagascar.  It will be good to see him fixed up and looking spic and span, and it will be good to resume our nomadic lifestyle on our own 4 wheels.  We have both really enjoyed how well we have lived, and how much unforgettable wildlife and scenery we have seen, since late April.  Our final tally for the first leg of Stanley’s Travels is something like this:

Total time since leaving Johannesburg:        5 months and 19 days

Total distance covered:                                 20,558 km

Number of countries visited:                        6

Number of national parks visited:               17

Number of flat tires:                                     2

Number of sunsets viewed:                          at least 130

Number of bottles of wine consumed:        probably too many

Number of amazing campsites:                   a large number

Favourite country:                                       Botswana

It really was a life-altering sort of trip, seeing so much of the beauty of the African bush up close and personal.  It would have been nice to get in more hiking and physical exercise (I feel a lot flabbier than would be the case after a bicycle trip of this duration!) but that is a minor quibble given the amazing time we had on a consistent basis for months on end.  Sitting around the campfire in so many beautiful locations, watching the sun set in a blaze of orange, gazing up at the stars, listening to the sounds of hyenas and nightjars and owls and lions in the distance:  all these experiences were made possible by us having bought Stanley. 

We look forward to lap two of Stanley’s Travels around Africa starting in December and continuing until…..we don’t know.  The plan is to head through South Africa, Swaziland and Lesotho, then head north into Namibia (the favourite country of almost everyone who explores southern Africa), cross into Zambia again and then drive further north into Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya.  If the security situation and visas permit, I’d like to head through Ethiopia (currently in the midst of serious unrest) and Sudan, but I’m not sure that will happen this time.  If we do make it to Sudan, it’s a bit of a dead end:  Egypt is a bureaucratic and monetary and security nightmare, and the other ways out are to take a ferry to Saudi Arabia (then Kuwait, Iran and Turkey to get to Europe), to return south to South Africa, or to ship Stanley out of Sudan somewhere else in the world.  We have not yet come to any final conclusion what the end game will be, but I am sure that the next leg of Stanley’s Travels will be as rewarding as the first one was.

Yet another African sunset at Augrabies Falls

Malawi: Stanley following in the Footsteps of Livingstone

Livingstone, Zambia, August 25th

Once again I have tarried a month since leaving a country before writing the blog post; I should do better, but I always say that and then always end up late the next time.  Now that we’re resting up and working a bit on Terri’s educational project here in Livingstone, the Olive Tree Learning Centre, I am trying to catch up on my delayed writing projects.

On the way uphill on the Skyline Trail, Mt. Mulanje

My previous post, about our Zimbabwe travels, ended with us leaving Zimbabwe on Monday, July 4^th and being shaken down by the customs officials in a combined Zimbabwean-Zambian operation.  It took hours and was very unpleasant (and fairly costly, with $40 in bribes, $27 in fees to touts, $73 in customs fees/carbon tax/third party insurance/road tolls and $160 for two double-entry visas).  We finally drove into Zambia late in the afternoon and scrounged around in the dismal little town of Chirundu for food, phone credit and beer before driving 8 km along a rough dirt track to the campsite at the Gwabi River Camp.  I’m sure that most of the time this is a wonderful place to stay, right on the Kafue River, with nice sunsets, good birds and some peace and quiet.  Unfortunately, it was a four-day weekend in Zambia and half of the white population of Lusaka had descended on Gwabi to party.  The campsite was full to overflowing with huge groups of drunk whites racing around in powerboats, shouting and playing music at full blast on their massive sound systems.  It was a terrible shock to the system after the perfect peace of Mana Pools.  We slept poorly as 1980s pop duelled with Bollywood film scores in the night air.

The next morning saw us have a quiet morning while the campground emptied of yobbos in various states of hangover.  Once everyone had left, it was a pretty place and I went for a long run and did some yoga before we packed up Stanley and drove to Lusaka.  Aside from some construction near Chirundu, the road was in good shape, fairly empty of traffic and running through some pretty hills.  We climbed back up from the Zambezi at 500 metres above sea level to the plateau at 1300 metres that makes up much of the country, passing through pretty savannah and scrub forest and the occasional town.  We entered the sprawl of Lusaka and were pleasantly surprised at the wealthy suburbs and newly-built malls that line the southern approaches to the city. We were staying at the house of my friend and former fellow LAS teacher Nathalie; she is now teaching in Lusaka, and we had to meet one of her relatives to pick up the house keys as Nathalie was already away on summer holidays.  We picked up the keys at a very fancy shopping mall from Fran, her cousin’s girlfriend, and had a good discussion over Italian gelato about life in Zambia as one of the small white community.  Unlike in Zimbabwe, the Zambian government has not been evicting white farmers from their land, and has in fact been recruiting Zimbabwean and South African farmers to come establish new commercial farms in the country.  The mall was full of white faces, most of them long-time (or life-long) Zambian residents, and it felt not unlike South Africa or Zimbabwe.  We did some grocery shopping and then headed back into the city centre to Nathalie’s place, where she lives in a pleasant compound with other teachers from her school.  Her neighbour Vicky, whom we had met in Livingstone back in March, was home and we had dinner with her that evening.

We spent three days in Lusaka, running errands, using Nathalie’s wi-fi and getting some repairs done to Stanley:  replacing the battery clamp that had broken on the Mana Pools road, changing oil and air filters, getting our cruise control fixed and trying (unsuccessfully) to get our reverse lights working again.  We also tried unsuccessfully to buy a COMESA yellow card insurance policy (good for all the COMESA countries, from Zambia to the Sudan) so that we didn’t have to buy new third-party car insurance at every border we crossed.  We were told that it is impossible to get a yellow card these days unless your car is registered in one of the COMESA countries; I don’t know if this is true, but we gave up trying.  We also got some decals printed and put onto Stanley’s back hatches and along the roofline, trying to personalize the car.  The decals didn’t get installed until 8 pm on the night before we left town, but they were worth waiting for, as they really changed Stanley’s look.

On Saturday, July 9^th we bid farewell to the creature comforts of Lusaka and drove a long day down the Great East Road all the way to the major eastern town of Chipata.  The pavement was exceptionally smooth, except for a short section of horrible gravel road right after I put Terri into the driver’s seat; it really was a coincidence!  As we neared Chipata, the countryside became more densely settled, with lots of cotton and tobacco being grown, and trucks piled high with bags of cotton.  We arrived at sundown and had difficulty finding Dean’s Hill Lodge, as our GPS sent us to a vacant lot about 200 metres from the right place.  When we got there, we found a cheerful, pleasant place to stay run by Andrea, the young French-Italian who has managed the place ever since the tragic murder of Dean, the previous owner.  There were lots of interesting people to talk to:  a South African couple just back from camping in Malawi in their 1974 Land Rover; Andrea himself; Luca, a young Italian cycle tourist; Mike, a young coffee enthusiast from Chicago; a couple of older Italians who had just built a new pizza oven for the kitchen; and a group of young American missionaries who were living and working near Livingstone but were scouting out possibilities for working in Chipata.

We set off the next morning fairly early and got to the Malawi border sooner than expected.  It was a mercifully easy and quick process to get stamped out of Zambia and into Malawi, although the US$ 75 visa fee that Malawi started charging recently was a rude surprise, as the visas were free a couple of years ago when our Lonely Planet was written.  In less than an hour we were driving down the road into Malawi, my 128^th country, with our Temporary Import Permit and our third-party insurance policy in hand.  Malawi is noticeably more densely populated than Zambia, with lots of slow going through villages and towns.  It’s also noticeably poorer than southern Zambia, with almost no vehicular traffic (except for vehicles driven by white NGO workers, of which there were quite a few).  Everyone seemed to be on bicycles, although we soon realized that most of the bicycles were used as taxis, with taxi license plates and padded seats on top of the luggage carriers.  It was good to see bicycles used so extensively, even if it is more because of lack of means to buy cars than because of a love of cycling. 

We drove along a well-paved road into the outskirts of Lilongwe, where we stopped to buy groceries before continuing south towards Mt. Mulanje, our first major destination in the country.  It was a very pretty drive, across a plain lit up starkly by the late afternoon light with a backdrop of high, isolated mountain massifs.  We didn’t have enough daylight left to get there in one day, so we looked up a place to stay on our GPS and ended up at the Dedza Pottery Village, a big community project set up by an American woman that employs over 100 people at a small lodge and restaurant, a big pottery workshop and gift store and a tour guiding outfit.  There are San hunter-gatherer rock art sites in the hills behind Dedza, but we were too late to see them that afternoon, and we had heard that they weren’t as impressive as what we had just seen in Zimbabwe, so we elected to give them a miss the next morning despite their UNESCO World Heritage designation.

Mulanje is an absolute riot of colourful flowers

It was a pleasant place to spend the night, although we awoke in the morning to cold drizzle.  Over breakfast we chatted with the only other guests, a British couple (Anna and Joe) who had been living in Malawi for several months while Anna did a stint working as a doctor in a hospital in Blantyre.  They gave us good tips about Mulanje as we shivered in the cold morning drizzle.  We bought a couple of new wine goblets and whisky shot glasses (if something made of pottery can be called a glass) to replace ones that we had broken over the previous few weeks, and then headed off down the road towards Mulanje.  Again the views across the plateau were stunning, and we caught our first glimpses of Lake Malawi far below.  The road ran right along the Mozambique border, and we could see the difference between the sparsely populated Mozambican side and the wall-to-wall cultivation on the Malawian side.  We stopped in Blantyre for groceries and upon returning to the car, we found that one of Stanley’s windshield wipers had stopped turning.  I tried to tighten the nut attaching the wiper arm but was put off by the sound that it made, so I gave up and we drove in search of a garage.  A service station attendant solved the problem for us in about 30 seconds with a wrench (I had been too gentle with my attempts earlier) and we paid him 1000 Malawian kwacha, about US$ 1.40, perhaps the best repair bargain of the trip.  

Mulanje massif overview

It was just as well that we got the wipers fixed, as it started raining hard as we approached Mulanje and we drove the last 10 km along a dirt track in dense fog and rain, barely able to see, before camping at the foot of the mountain near the forestry office.  It was a cold, wet night and we were glad that Stanley is as rainproof as he is.  Unfortunately the waterproofness didn’t extend to the back door, as it doesn’t seal very tightly and allowed rain to run down the inside of the door, soaking some groceries and most of Terri’s clothing.

Our guide for Mt. Mulanje, Aubrey

We woke up on Tuesday, July 12^th to no rain and clearing skies.  By the time we staggered out of bed, a would-be guide was waiting outside for us.  In fact, the night before another prospective guide had run along with Stanley for the last 2 km of the drive, offering his services, but he was nowhere to be seen this time around.  We cooked up breakfast, then decided to hire the young man, Aubrey, for the princely sum of 9000 Malawian kwacha a day (about US$ 13 a day).  After waiting for Terri’s clothes to dry, we locked up Stanley, engaged another young man to keep an eye on Stanley in our absence and set off uphill, ready for 3 days and 2 nights on the mountain.  The path led first through a huge clearcut at the base of the hill.  Commercial timber was being sawn by hand from big pine trees, while the offcuts were being carried downhill on the heads of hundreds of women, destined for cooking fires in the village.  It looked like desperately hard work, harder than hiking uphill in stout hiking boots with backpacks on our backs.  Above the clearcut the path headed fairly steeply upwards along the flank of a river valley, looking across at some impressive rock faces on the other bank.  We sweated uphill for 900 vertical metres along the Skyline Trail, most of the way under a disused cablecar that had been used to transport logs down from the Chambe Basin.

Mulanje's forest walking down the hill as firewood.

Once we reached the top of the climb, the landscape changed utterly.  The Chambe Basin had once been full of pine plantations, established at the cost of stands of native Mulanje cedars, but these plantations have been clearcut over the past few years, allegedly so that the cedars can be re-established.  Wandering through a clearcut along old logging roads and firebreaks was less scenic than I had anticipated, but luckily the high rock ramparts and sheer cliffs of Chambe Peak loomed on one side, while the rugged peaks of the centre of the massif dominated the skyline on the other side, so we had something prettier to look at.  Cape robin-chats, clouds of queleas, ravens and several species of sunbirds flew around the basin, while there was a wealth of pretty wildflowers to beautify the desolation of the clearcut.  By 3 o’clock, four hours after setting off, we were settling into the wonderfully situated Chambe Hut, watching the afternoon light play on the cliffs of Chambe Peak.  We were the only guests in the hut that evening, and the hut-keeper stoked up a roaring fire for us to cook up our steaks and potatoes.  We retired early, ready for a big summit day the following day.

Chambe Peak in the afternoon light

July 13^th started early, with a 5:30 wakeup call and a 6:30 departure after a quick cereal breakfast.  We marched through more clearcuts in the cool of the morning, finally entering small stands of native hardwood as we toiled uphill to Chitepo Hut, which we reached by 9:00.  We paused for an hour for some instant noodles and tea while Terri dried some of her clothes, before heading for the summit of Sapitwa Peak at 10:00.  In retrospect this was a silly idea; as the highest point of land between South Africa’s Drakensberg and the mountains of northern Tanzania (It tops out at 3001 metres above sea level), Sapitwa collects clouds every afternoon, and this day was no exception.  Although skies were clear at 9 when we arrived at the hut, we departed under rapidly lowering clouds an hour later, and were inside their moist embrace by 11.  The climb was steep, and involved a fair bit of rockhopping, so the moist rocks made climbing treacherous.  Much of the path leads inclined slabs of rock that require a fair bit of grip to stay on, so at times we were reduced to climbing on hands and knees.  As we got closer to the summit, the weather really socked in and mist turned to actual rain.  

The soggy retreat from our summit bid

Eventually, at 12:50, we decided that the summit, only 100 vertical metres but apparently still 40 minutes away, wasn’t worth going to as visibility was nil.  We were also acutely aware of how miserable a descent in the dark would be, as we had met a party that had come down in the dark the day before, and so we wanted to be down before sunset. 

Morning clouds rolling in over the massif

The descent was a bit hair-raising, with long sections of scooting downhill on our backsides rather than risking falling from a standing position on slippery wet rocks.  Terri was unhappy with our situation, and was very relieved when we popped out at Chitembo Hut by 3:45.  We cooked up a pot of lentil curry over the fire and retired to bed early, legs tired from the long descent and mentally fatigued from having to think carefully about every step of the way.

Morning view from Chitepo Hut

We slept in until the late hour of 6:30 after a night of heavy rain; we were both very glad that we hadn’t been out on the mountain in that kind of downpour.  We had a leisurely breakfast of cereal and toast before donning our packs and heading back towards Chambe Hut at 8:30 under clearing skies (although fresh clouds were already wreathing Sapitwa behind us).  The descent was slow at first until we reached a four-way trail junction after an hour and a half.  From here it was finally possible to walk quickly and fluidly, and it was a very enjoyable walk across moorland until we reached the Chapaluka River and its pretty pools, waterfalls and rapids.  Finally, around noon, we got to the pretty swimming hole known as Old Men’s Falls, where I had a cold but welcome dip and leap off the cliffs; Terri elected to stay warm.  We were fairly close to our starting point, and a couple of parties of tourists arrived while we were there on short day trips up to the falls.  We strolled back to Stanley, paid off Aubrey (not without some attempts on his part to wheedle extra money out of us) and started driving towards the Zomba Plateau. 

Mulanje massif with waterfalls above and tea plantations below

The scenery, now that we were driving in sunshine, was very pretty.  A series of tea plantations encircle the base of the Mulanje Massif, carpeting the land in lush green bushes, while up above high waterfalls cascade down the steep rock faces below the peaks.  The land (as everywhere in Malawi) is densely settled, and the roads were busy with bicycles transporting firewood or paying passengers, along with hundreds of women carrying huge loads of firewood on their heads.  We both commented on the fact that few women seemed to own bicycles; men transported loads of wood on their bicycles, while women were left to lug almost equally huge quantities of firewood on their heads.  It didn’t seem fair.  We stopped off in Mulanje Town to eat a hard-earned and delicious pizza at Mulanje Pepper, the restaurant that seems to be the centrepiece of expat life in Mulanje, before heading north towards Zomba.  Overall I was very pleased with our hiking on Mt. Mulanje, even if the summit try was several hours of soggy misery.  I love overnight hiking trips, and spending so much time in a vehicle on this overland trip makes liberation from internal combustion engines all the more welcome.  The scenery is pretty, the views down across the lowlands are endless and the huts are excellent (and amazing value, at MK 1000 (US$ 1.40) per person per night!). 

More Mulanje flowers

It took much longer to get to Zomba than we had anticipated, and while it was nice to see Mulanje and other isolated mountains in the late afternoon light while driving, it was fully dark as we got to Zomba Town.  This made finding our campsite up high on the Zomba Plateau challenging, especially as our GPS was hallucinating and had no clue what the road layout actually was.  Our destination, the Ku Chawe Trout Farm, was unsignposted and looked abandoned, but was actually in operation as a campsite, even if the trout had all died.  It was a wonderful place to camp under the trees, and we chatted with the only other guests, a party of British sixth-form students on a humanitarian service trip under the auspices of an outfit called Inspire Worldwide.  Terri was intrigued by Inspire and we exchanged contact details with the trip leaders, hoping perhaps to get a British school to come out and do a trip to Olive Tree Learning Centre, the school that Terri has been nurturing for the past decade in Livingstone, Zambia.  Between our late arrival, our tiredness and chatting, it was 10:30 before we got to bed, glad to snuggle into our down sleeping bags in the damp chill of the air up at 1500 metres.

Somehow, despite getting up at 7 am, we didn’t get moving until nearly noon the next day, putting paid to our idea to go hiking around the forests of the Zomba Plateau.  Instead we ate pancakes, cleaned and packed and showered and suddenly looked at our watches in alarm before setting off for Cape Maclear.  We stopped off in Zomba town for perhaps the most dismal supermarket shopping of the entire trip at a Shoprite U-Save that was utterly bereft of anything that didn’t come in a packet or a can.  We tanked up on diesel, took out another couple of instalments of MK 40,000 from the ATM (only about US$ 57, the maximum that the ATMs can dispense at one time, given that the biggest denomination bill is only 1000 kwacha) and headed off north.  It was frustratingly slow going through the endless succession of densely-populated villages that make up rural Malawi.  Eventually we turned off the main highway towards the southern end of Lake Malawi.  The villages in this area show much more Muslim influence, with mosques and Islamic charities replacing churches and Christian NGOs.  This is apparently a legacy of the slave trade that played such a big role in the 19^th century during the time that David Livingstone was undertaking his epic voyages. 

The Rift Valley floor, at 500 metres above sea level, was noticeably warmer than our surroundings for most of the past week.  The driving was flat and fairly quick until we reached the Cape Maclear turnoff, where a few kilometres of rough dirt suddenly gave rise to perfect new asphalt halfway to Cape Maclear (right at the boundary marker for Lake Malawi National Park; perhaps the UNESCO World Heritage money has been spent on the road?).  We watched sunset as we drove, and drove into town in the gloaming.  We had heard good things about a backpackers called the Funky Cichlid, so we parked Stanley in their parking lot and settled in for the night.  We ate freshly-caught cichlid fish for dinner and then retired to Stanley for a restful night’s sleep. 

Stanley camped at the old Golden Sands Hotel in Cape Maclear

This didn’t work out quite as planned.  It was Friday night, and the backpackers of Cape Maclear arrived en masse at the Funky Cichlid to party.  The music levels got louder and louder and festivities raged on until 2 am.  We slept very, very poorly, and decided that we had needed to find new digs the next morning.  We pulled out our folding bikes and went exploring, finally settling on the abandoned Golden Sands resort up the beach inside the Lake Malawi National Park, where we negotiated a deal for camping and park admission for three nights for MK 35,000.  It was an idyllic spot, away from the main village, and we settled in for three days of rest and recreation. 

Cape Maclear sunset

Lake Malawi is famous for its profusion of fish species, particularly colourful cichlids, and we went snorkelling that afternoon around the corner from our campsite.  The water level in the lake was low, as we could see from marks on the boulders lining the shore; the El Nino-fuelled drought has hit Malawi particularly hard.  The snorkelling was lovely, comparable in terms of colour and variety to a reef in the tropical ocean, although distinctly chillier.  We had a spectacular sunset over the waters of the lake and ate a ridiculously tasty beef stew that Terri had concocted.

The next day found us renting a sea kayak at the Cape Maclear Eco Lodge to explore the offshore island that lurked invitingly just off the mainland.  We paddled out to the nearest point, hauled the kayak out and had another excellent snorkel around the rocks through a rainbow of fish before exploring further along the coastline.  It felt really good to be under our own power and away from the bustle of the village, out in quite a pretty landscape, with azure lake waters and an island full of small baobab trees.  Pied kingfishers, fish eagles and hamerkops circled in the air, and we enjoyed the illusion of being out in the middle of nowhere.  We returned to shore, ate some delicious French fries whipped up by a roadside vendor calling himself McDonalds and returned to the Golden Sands for another beautiful sunset and some fried fillets of freshly caught chambo fish that we bought from a local fisherman.

Chambo fish being filleted on the beach

On our third day we got up earlier than usual and cycled back to the Eco Lodge to go diving.  It was just the two of us and the dive instructor, Addie, an interesting young American aspiring marine biologist.  The dive was pleasant, with lots of cichlids, but we weren’t lucky enough to spot any of the large kalambo catfish that lurk in the depths.  We all got cold, so we surfaced after 40 minutes with lots of air left and all had a brisk shivering session to warm up.  It was only my second dive (out of a total of about 280) that I’ve ever done in fresh water, and while it was fun, it was cold enough that we didn’t feel the need to do a second dive.  We had a delicious lunch back at the Eco Lodge while talking to Addie’s family who had just arrived for a visit from the US.  I found her brother interesting; he is a “budding” entrepreneur in selling grow-your-own hydroponic systems to potheads in the newly decriminalized cannabis states such as Colorado.  That afternoon I went for a long, slightly meandering run up into the hills behind the lake before supper and a bit of blog post writing that didn’t get very far before I had to turn in, tired.

Graves of early missionaries at Cape Maclear

On our way out of Cape Maclear the next day (July 19^th), we stopped in briefly to visit the graves of two early Scottish missionaries who had followed hard on the heels of David Livingstone in establishing Livingstonia Mission at Cape Maclear in 1875.  One had died in 1877 and the other in 1880, both in the late rainy season, both of malaria.  The mission was soon relocated up the lake twice, ending up eventually in the current town of Livingstonia, much further north and perched 500 metres above the lake in a much less malarial area.  I saw a sign from PSI, a big international NGO for which two friends of mine have worked over the years, stating that they were supplying antimalarial mosquito nets to the area today, so I hope that it’s less malarial today than it was in the past.

PSI at work at Cape Maclear

We mused on the lives of these early missionaries as we drove north along an excellent road, distracted by our GPS trying to send us down non-existent roads and by Stanley’s engine losing power occasionally for a few seconds at a time.  Our destination for the day was Senga Bay, only 200 km down the road, where we were camped by noon in the genteel surroundings of the Steps Campground, attached to the poshest hotel in town.  It was a wonderfully relaxing place to spend the afternoon reading, cooking, swimming, running and playing guitar before another lovely sunset and a delicious dinner of baked pasta.  I finally finished up the Zimbabwe blog post sitting outside in the perfect evening temperatures under the stars.  Senga was just an overnight stop for us, but I could easily have spent a few more relaxing days there, although I imagine (given its proximity to Lilongwe) that it fills up on weekends and school holidays.

From Senga we put in a 300 km day to get to Nkhata Bay, our most northerly stop on the lakeshore.  It took longer than expected as the previous day’s power cuts in Stanley’s engine continued with greater frequency.  We finally diagnosed an electrical fault and discovered that the battery had come loose from its new clamp and that the clamp was in contact with one of the battery terminals when we went over bumps, setting up a short circuit.  An assortment of gas station attendants helped us repair the problem in a small roadside town, where we also met a distinctly dodgy South African guy living there whom everyone seemed to distrust and dislike. 

We rolled into Nkhata Bay in the mid-afternoon.  This place is a major stop on the overlander circuit and its lodges are pretty expensive by Malawi standards.  As well, for campers such as ourselves the hilly topography of the lakeshore makes it difficult to park a vehicle somewhere both scenic and flat.  We looked at a few places before settling on Butterfly Space, the cheapest and friendliest accommodation in town.  We camped at the top of the sprawling complex, under shady trees, and spent the next three nights there.  Butterfly Space is an interesting concept, with many of the guests volunteering on various community projects around Nkhata Bay. Daniel, an Irish guy helping to run the place, was great to talk to, full of information and stories about local goings-on.  Daniel told me that when he told a friend of his, a former Africa correspondent for the Guardian, that he was coming to Malawi, the friend told him that “there are more white elephants than grey elephants in Malawi”, alluding to Malawi’s status as a darling of the NGO and foreign ODA community and the lack of major results in improving people’s lives despite the billions spent over the past few decades.

Bicycle taxi man in Mzuzu

Nkhata Bay is pretty, and we had fun for a couple of days, swimming and running and paddling around in canoes and kayaks and even a stand-up paddleboard.  Because the lakeshore is hilly and heavily indented, it somehow feels a bit like a corner of the Mediterranean dropped into Central Africa.  There is a bit of an edge of locals trying out various scams on foreigners, and the town itself is rather unprepossessing, but I liked Butterfly Space and the various travellers I met there, including a Spanish couple cycling from South Africa to Rwanda, Daniel and a couple of Belgian mathematicians-turned-vagabonds.  The sunsets were pretty, while the moonrises over the lake (it was full moon when we arrived) were stunning.  For reasons that I can’t quite make out now, I didn’t take a single photograph during our stay at Nkhata Bay.

Malawi taxi service

I made up for that lack of photographic effort at our next and final stop in Malawi, the Nyika Plateau.  We drove up to the plateau on Saturday, July 23^rd, through the up-and-coming town of Mzuzu and its well-stocked Shoprite supermarket.  While there we talked to a bicycle taxi man about his business model.  While he owns his own bicycle, he is in a distinct minority; he only moonlights on weekends to supplement his regular job and has enough money to buy his own bike.  Most bicycle taxi drivers don’t have the US$ 100 or so needed to buy their own bike and instead rent one for MK 1000 (US$ 1.40) a day from a wealthy businessmen who owns an entire fleet of bicycles.  Rides are priced depending on distance, with MK 150 (about US$ 0.20) a good average price.  Drivers can usually earn MK 2000 a day (about US$ 3), but if they are renting, that gets cut in half to MK 1000.  Not a horrible wage in a country like Malawi, but not enough to ever save up much money. 

Bushbuck, Nyika Plateau

From Mzuzu the road up to the Nyika Plateau rapidly deteriorated from excellent asphalt to heavily corrugated and potholed dirt, and it was a long, slow slog up to the park gate and then on to the campsite at Chelinda.  The road climbs steadily from Mzuzu, eventually reaching an altitude of 2300 metres above sea level.  The last 15 km or so the scenery opens up to a huge rolling grassland plateau that stretches out to the horizon.  We got to the campsite just in time for a lovely sunset and settled in for three nights’ stay. 

Nyika plateau zebras

I loved the Nyika Plateau.  The scenery is quite unlike anywhere else I have been in Africa, sort of “Serengeti meets Mongolia”, with lots of open grassland full of interesting herbivore species.  There are lots of roan antelope, one of the prettiest species around with their bold facial markings, along with plenty of zebra, common reedbuck and even a few eland.  We took a lot of photos of roan and eland, and peered into the patches of bush in the hope of seeing one of the local leopards.  We went for a long bicycle ride on our folding bikes one day, and a long walk the next day along a slightly ill-chosen path around a pine plantation that is said to harbour leopards, but which offers next to nothing in terms of birds or scenery.  My favourite spot, though, was the campsite.  On the first night we had the whole place to ourselves, while on the next two nights we shared with three other groups.  The sunsets over the plateau were magical, as were the morning views of zebra and bushbuck wandering right past our camper.  It was distinctly chilly as soon as the sun went down, but the campsite attendant busied himself keeping our campfires going and heating water for hot showers.  Sitting at our campfire staring up at the stars, or watching eland passing in the late afternoon golden light, I felt as though I was in some sort of hunter-gatherer idyll.

Roan antelope 

Eland, Nyika Plateau

Sadly all good things must come to an end, so on Tuesday, July 26^th we bid a sad farewell to the wonderful atmosphere of Nyika and retraced our steps to the park headquarters, stopping in a vain attempt to spot the bar-tailed trogon in a patch of forest just over the Zambian side of the border; we did spot Livingstone’s turaco and several species of sunbird.  It was when we turned off towards the Zambian border that the track really began to deteriorate.  We could barely find the right track to get to the border, and at times I felt we were driving along a footpath, but eventually we got to the Malawian immigration post where a startled part-time employee had to phone Mzuzu for instructions on how to stamp us out of the country.  It was one of the most informal border crossings I have ever done, a feeling augmented by the fact that there is no Zambian border post; we just drove into the country with a vague instruction from the Malawian official in Mzuzu to do our immigration and customs formalities in Isoka, 200 km away.

Roan antelope, Nyika Plateau

We had been in Malawi for 16 days and covered 1850 km.  I rather liked Malawi, although I found the high population density and obvious rural poverty a bit sad, especially given the number of white expats driving around in fancy NGO Land Cruisers.  The landscape is lovely, with the Rift Valley escarpment and the isolated massifs of the south a real highlight.  Lake Malawi is very pretty, with the feeling of the ocean about it, and I enjoyed snorkelling and swimming and diving there.  From the point of view of outdoor activities, Malawi was perhaps our most active destination so far, with cycling, running, hiking and various watersports in the mix.  The flip side of its poverty is that it is by far the least expensive country in the region in terms of food and accommodation, which may explain part of its appeal to backpackers.  Although I enjoyed our time there, I don’t think I would go out of my way to visit the country again, especially given its awkward positioning for overland travel now that accessing it through Mozambique is problematic.  However it should certainly feature on any backpacker's or overlander's travels through southern Africa.

Common reedbuck, Nyika Plateau

My next post will be about our adventures in the wonderful north of Zambia, and with any luck (or tenacity on my part), it will be posted within a week.  Stay tuned, and I hope you enjoyed reading this!

Terri and I at Old Man's Falls on Mt. Mulanje